Eh, it's hardly worth the effort. I'll play at it just because I'll be loading up on mats for the event anyways. Maybe get myself a seasonal bomb or something, but I really just hate when OOO finally attempts to expand the difficulty and it's a totally different sense of difficulty. I can finally put my finger on why I hate so many of their difficulty experiments- they don't feel spiral knights in a lot of senses.

They could get meatier enemies, more diverse attacks, smarter and more complex enemy formations- heck, a lot of those already exist within the realms of the event, they're just coupled with I would categorize as failed experiments:
-Tortodrones. Hey they, have a unique damage table in a double bossfight, and health drops somewhat routinely... except their attacks are built in a spammy and 0 windup manner, completely unlike everything else SK... so you either manage to stay out of every form of crosshair all at once, or you get buried underneath multiple consecutive shock artillery spreads.
-Apocrea, because having a ghost chase you around a graveyard and spam random hands using their failed tentacle attacks (as in if it spawns under you with its 0 warning, let's just call it a melee hit...) with a literal deathray attack from its eyes. Not to mention all the issues met with invis/shield completely bypassing its attempt to lock you down and kill you. Also, completely inconsistent token drop rates and ghost physics that are notoriously buggy when combined with latency, which you can expect during major events.
-Ghost in the machine's tentacle and laser using boss. Buggable, broken with tentacle attacks once again, and very very boring coupled with an absurd amount of firepower needed to level the boss, and then babysitting his minions. You win by some combination of hiding in a corner (which, additionally, everyone discovers because it's instinctive in nature), bugging the minions into the BP's buggy collision box, and using hilariously slanted effects from multi-penetrating weapons. I own a CTR Divine Avenger, so I can speak that is disproportionately effective vs the boss.
-The occasional Mary Sue or borderline Mary Sue enemies. Gosh, a good number of these keep cropping up, and it's not as much the difficulty as much as having no weaknesses lacks a lot of character and definition for the enemies, so they just seem boring, absurd, and remind you you're in a video game all too much. "You've been placed under some sort of ancient, powerful curse!" "I used cloaking technology, nah I'm good". A trojan will feel like a more reactive, realistic enemy in how it's slow and high powered, and even the often more challenging devilites are squishy, because they're fast and not tough. It really emphasizes the features of the character.

There are things that really tick me off both because they can be done improperly or they just can't be done in the old style of the game in at least a few senses. I'm looking forward to the day they produce a more standard flavor of challenge that's just finally inflated to a level where it still challenges the players. I would prefer a wall of 8 missile turrets instead of 2 that come back to life in a matter of seconds. Vana did a decent, prolonged bossfight based on HP and minions as well, but that was a matter of minutes, and the minions take more time to dispose of, so focusing on ads feels like a duty rather than a nuisance. I dunno, maybe it's just my taste on things.

@Octalash er wat. I never said I couldn't do those lol.

For all three of those, that is literally what I did and why I came out victorious. I never said I had issues completing those, because I didn't. I was the guy running T3 solo and doing well with dodge/cloak and optimal spirit hunting gear on elite while my guild mates hid behind T2 and T1 party invites for normal difficulty. Tagged along with one once, I laughed SO hard at the decreased token rates. I do all the danger missions, solo, on elite, almost exclusively without dying literally every day. I do crave challenge, but all of those listed points don't satisfy because I'm not getting tougher SK, I'm getting another game's combat philosophy implanted into spiral knights. There are games with no forewarning on enemy attacks and that don't care if you get caught in attacks with no warning, but spiral knights doesn't do that 99% of the time, so why change that instead of just improving within the tried and true bounds?

My overall point is just this: Why make a holiday mission at shadow lair-like difficulty (if you've been to a few, you'll realize a lot of trends in enemy formation and how they use fast-respawning enemies on a dime) for just reskins of normal loot? Yes, people can do it. People can run it flawlessly, and people do, this can be said for both SL's and the holiday events. I've seen a party-wide flawless torto run by T2's before lol. But most people just pack a crapload of sparks, grit their teeth, and suicide squad to get their gear and never go back again. SL's were okay to suicide squad, because they were costly, they had unique, envious rewards for both usage and bragging rights, and they made you fight for your gamble in things. This is just going in, maybe failing, maybe getting far, maybe winning sometime later after practice and application, but the rewards are utter crap, and the raw difference in time needed and difficulty between the first and second floors (although both are possible and quite capable to get very far in consistently with only a few hours' practice) really just either screams you're there to win the suicide squad with as little suicide involved as possible or you're a moron for poorly allocating your time in an already time consumptive grinding process. I can run that first floor 2x as fast as getting to stage 3 in the 2nd, because there is less division and hijinks, it's just straightforward ambushes with some respawns vs divided, complicated ambushes you want to play through step by step ideally.

Overall, it makes little sense. Why go through the grinding process at all? Very little reason, really. The holiday stuff is more work than getting 25K CR and getting the recipe yourself, AND it'll look more fruity along the way. I tend to not take people who demand difficulty too seriously. There are plenty of people that can do everything with 2 weapon slots and 0 trinkets, but for every one of those there's 9 people that have "bought in" and bring all the game-defeating trinkets (C42 is too easy, please buff ~Guy who intentionally made himself immune to poison and fire) and whine that the game is too easy after forcibly ripping the difficulty straight out of its chest. For the people that can solo it all without buffing yourself up, solo, on elite, I'm happy for you, but I also know the curse of having very little, if anything, in the game left of challenge to you, and maybe you do deserve a harder, meatier challenge now and again, but I will continue to disagree on the styles at which OOO brings to the palette with 90% good and 10% raw annoyance. And that is just a preference thing.